Philosophy of Nature

473 Pages·2004·32.197 MB·English

by  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

H EG EL’S
c.Philosophy o f T^ature
BEING PART TWO OF TH E
EN CYCLO PAED IA OF
THE PHILOSOPHICAL SC IEN C ES (1830)
TR A N SLA TED FROM N ICO LIN AND
PÖ G G ELER’S ED ITIO N (iqsq)
AND FROM TH E ZU SÄ TZE IN
M IC H ELET’S T EX T (1847)
BY
A. V. M IL L E R
WITH FOSBWORD BY
J. N. F IN D L A Y , F.B.A.
O XFO RD
A T T H E C LA R EN D O N PR E SS
OXPORD
vrnvFiLsrTY puss
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OYi 6DP
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide in
Oxford New York
Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai
Dax es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi
Sao Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto
Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
© Oxford University Press 1970, 2004
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 1970
Reissued 2004
All rights reserved. No parr of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without rhe prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent ro rhe Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, ar the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Data available
ISBN 0-19-917267-0
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 1
Typeset in Sabon by
Cambrian Typesetters, Frimley, Surrey
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
CPI, Bath
FOREWORD
J. N. FINDLAY
T he present translation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is part
of an attempt to complete the translation of his Encyclopaedia of
the Philosophical Sciences of which two parts already exist in
W. Wallace's translation of the Logic (with editorial Zusätze) and
of the Philosophy of Mind (without editorial Zusätze), both pub­
lished by the Clarendon Press. Though published towards the
end of the last century, these translations have held their ground,
and have a liveliness and a literary sparkle not found in other
English versions, which atones for their occasional looseness and
use of periphrasis, and which points to what can only be described
as a spiritual identification with the genius of Hegel. The present
translation is of the whole Philosophy of Nature, together with the
editorial Zusätze. It is hoped in an ensuing volume to present
Wallace's translation of the numbered paragraphs of the Philo­
sophy of Mind (or Philosophy of Spirit), the third part of the
Encyclopaedia, together with the Zusätze which, in the first
collected editions, accompany only its first section. The Philosophy
of Nature has been translated throughout by Mr. A. V. Miller,
a dedicated Hegelian, though I have considered all his renderings
and have given him what help I could with many difficult terms
and passages. The translation of Zusätze to the Philosophy of
Mind (Spirit) will also be Mr. Miller’s work.
The translation has been made from Karl Ludwig Michelet’s
edition of the Naturphilosophie, published in 1847 in the Second
Edition of Hegel's Collected Works, but Nicolin and Pöggeler’s
1959 edition of the Encyclopaedia (without Zusätze) has been
consulted for the text of the numbered paragraphs. The trans­
lation of the Zusätze raises many problems, fortunately not
peculiar to the present translation. The Zusätze for the Natur­
philosophie were compiled by Michelet, a devoted pupil of Hegel’s
but also an original philosopher of some standing, from written
VI FOREWORD
material connected with eight courses of lectures on the subject
given (respectively) in Jena in 1805-6, in Heidelberg in the sum­
mer of 1818, and in Berlin in the years 1819-20, 1821-2, 1823-4,
1825-6,1828, and 1830. Some of this written material was Hegers
own, e.g. his Jena notes for 1805-6 reprinted by Hoffmeister
in 1931 as the second volume of the Jenenser Realphilosophie,
the notes written or placed in his copies of the 1817 and 1827
editions of the Encyclopaedia, his lecture notes for his various
Berlin courses: in these much of the earlier material was taken
over into the later versions. Other written material was afforded
by students’ lecture-notes taken down by Michelet himself (two
sets) and by three others. The way in which Michelet conflated
this material has been harshly judged, particularly in regard to the
colourful fragments taken over from the Jena material. As Hoff­
meister remarks (.Realphilosophie, vol. ii, 1931, p. ix):
This working together of thoughts separated in part by decades,
however much the individual passages taken over were tested for their
suitability in support of the systematics of the mature work, must
injure the latter. And, on the other hand, since the passages taken over
are not distinguished, they afford no insight into Hegel’s youthful
work. Through this dubious method, Michelet robs the words of Hegel’s
youth of their originality: he simply omits difficult passages, generally
introduces only what is easy to read, and often amends far too idio-
syncratically. He fits single statements into other contexts, indeed he
often quite turns them round since they would otherwise not fit later
paragraphs, he has, in short, to round things off.
Nicolin and Pöggeler remark in similar vein: ‘The procedure of
Hegel's friends and pupils can only be properly understood as
springing from their basic philosophical attitude. They were
looking for the cpmplete, closed system on which they could
build and to which they could make their additions. They there­
fore brought to their task no interest in the development of
Hegel’s thought and the documents of its development’ (Intro, to
Encyclopaedia, 1959, pp. xlv-vi).
It must be admitted that Michelet (like the other editors) took
more liberties with his material than would now be taken by
editors in a similar position. He would perhaps have been wise to
base himself on one version, rather than try to do justice to all.
FOREWORD vii
Occasionally the drift of a sentence is completely changed by
Michelet. Thus in the Jena manuscript (Realphilosophie, vol. ii,
p. 33) Hegel writes: ‘what is only inner is just as much outer; for
it is the Other as this outer existence.’ The latter part of this is
changed by Michelet to ‘for it is the Other of this outer existence’.
It mußt, however, be remembered that Hegel’s Encyclopaedia was
a condensed, arid compendium, put out as a foundation for
detailed comment and explanation in lectures. Without such
material as is provided by the editorial Zusätze it would be largely
uninterpretable, a monumental inscription in Linear B. Many
scholars have written as if those who first published the Zusätze
deserved blame, whereas they deserve boundless gratitude. No
doubt we shall some day see all the versions of Hegel’s lecture-
material and students’ notes published separately by the Hegel-
Archiv, but it is not clear when this will happen, and whether the
whole vast array of material will ever, or ought ever, to be trans­
lated into English. The Zusatz-method probably represented the
best that could be done at the time, and it made Hegel intelligible
and established his philosophical image for the ensuing century.
It is still unclear whether that image will be substantially altered
by the new labours of source-disentanglement, or that the altera­
tions made by Hegel's pupils and friends were of anything but
minor philosophical importance. It must be remembered, further,
that not only the Encyclopaedia, but the Philosophy of Right has
had a large body of useful Zusätze added to it, and that the text of
Hegel's lectures on Aesthetics, the Philosophy of Religion, the
Philosophy of History, and the History of Philosophy is in every
case the product of a conflation of materials from different
lecture-courses similar to that which has produced the Zusätze.
It may, further, be wondered whether the concern for Hegel’s
‘development’ displayed by many writers, is not excessive,
especially in a situation where there are no reliable, detailed
commentaries on his major works. The Juvenilia of Berne and
Frankfurt have been studied exhaustively for very many decades,
and have thrown very little light on any major notion or position
in Hegel’s mature work: they remain writings, interesting as
reflections of their time and place, which give absolutely no
indication that their writer was ever destined to be a great
FOREWORD
philosopher, let alone one of the greatest of all philosophers.
Hegel, like many another young philosopher faced with a teaching
situation, and with names like <metaphysics> and 'logic1 to channel
his effort, matured overnight from the (to my mind) rather dreary
lucubrations of his years of tutorship to the astounding writings
of the Jena period (those available in Lasson’s Jenenser Logik and
in the Realphilosophie published by Hoffmeister). These writings
everywhere anticipate the positions and method of the mature
system, and are obviously the work of a very great thinker. There
is undoubtedly development in the passage from these writings
to the later mature works, but not the sort of causally explanatory,
psychological development which those who have devoted atten­
tion to the Juvenilia seem to have been looking for. It is even
arguable that the great interest shown in these Juvenilia stems, in
part, from an unwillingness to scale the main crags of the system:
men linger among its foothills because these resemble the lower-
lying territories in which they feel best able to work and think.
It is not, however, our wish to offer further argument for
publishing a translation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature which
includes the Zusätze of Michelet, and of the Philosophy of Spirit
which will include the Zusätze of Boumann, just as W. Wallace’s
historic translation of the Logic included the Zusätze of Leopold
von Henning. Our aim is to be useful, to make Hegel’s thought
accessible to students and teachers, particularly in regions where
prejudiced simplifications might otherwise be their only route of
access to it. It was our intention to supplement the present volume
with a volume of Notes, in which the scientific interpretation and
historical background of Hegel’s treatment of nature would be
given, and it would be made plain how deeply informed he was
on all matters scientific, and how remote from the prejudiced
picture of him as a inerely a priori thinker. Circumstances of an
extremely unfortunate character have, however, made it impossible
for us to carry out this part of our task, but we believe none the
less that Hegel can be allowed to speak for himself, and that the
purport of his scientific views, and the wealth and depth of his
empiricism (as one facet of his philosophical habit) will come
clearly through. It will, in fact, be plain that Hegel, like Aristotle
and Descartes and Whitehead, is one of the great philosophical
FOREWORD
interpreters of nature, as steeped in its detail as he is audacious in
his treatment of it. It only remains for me, in the remainder of this
short Introduction, to ‘liberate my soul1 much as Wallace did in
the essays which accompany his translations (though at briefer
length), and to indicate what I think is the place of the Natur­
philosophie in Hegel's absolutism, and how I conceive that it has
contributed to the philosophical understanding of the natural world.
The most enlightening way to approach Hegelianism as a
system, and the Philosophy of Nature as one of its essential parts
(which in a sense also includes the whole in itself), is to regard it
as an essay in Absolute-theory, an attempt to frame the notion or
work out the logic of an Absolute, by which is to be understood
something whose existence is both ^/^-explanatory and all-
explanatory, an inheritor, in short, of the religious conception of
a God, as of the various materialisms, idealisms, spiritualisms,
etc., whose objects have been given some of the notional ultimacy
and uniqueness of a God. It has recently been questioned whether
the notion of an Absolute played the central part in Hegel’s
philosophy that most interpreters had supposed; certainly the
Absolute of Hegel is not at all like the Absolute of many modern
idealists, but that his whole philosophy is an attempt to work out
the notion of something that he calls ‘the Absolute* will, on a
careful reading, admit of no question. All the categories of the
Logic are confessedly an ascending series of definitions of ‘the
Absolute', which ends up in the supreme category of the Absolute
Idea: the other parts of the system show us the same Absolute
functioning more concretely, but still notionally, in other fields
than ‘the medium of pure thought'. To manners of thought to
which the conception of an Absolute is alien and superfluous, and
to which everything that is not an empty piece of formalism is
simply an encountered piece of fact, whose relation to other such
pieces is no more than another encountered piece of such fact,
there is no logic in the workings of the Hegelian system, no
inherent unrest or self-contradiction in any of its notions or
phases that fail of total explanation, no need to pass beyond them
to a more satisfactory embodiment of absoluteness. It is only if
one belongs to a ‘speculative’ tradition, and finds something
logically absurd, imperatively requiring supplementation, in any
FOREWORD
mere fact, or collocation of mere facts, or even mere collocation
of necessities, and one will only admit ultimate contingencies if
one has some basic conception which enables one to see, in general
terms, just why and how there can and must be such contingencies,
that Hegel can hope to achieve some ‘bite’ on one’s thinking,
though it is of course open to the speculative thinker to argue that
all the constructive enterprises of science, all the appeals of
morality, etc., only 'make sense* on such a basis. Hegel is, however,
singular as an Absolutist, not only in holding that an element of
contingency, of brute, empirical fact, is demanded (not, of course,
as regards its detailed content, but in respect of its general pres­
ence) by the very notion of his Absolute, but also that, even in the
regions where unity and total explanation 'in the end’ prevail,
there must yet be an initial, lower-level element of disunity and
external irrelevance for such unity and total explanation to over­
come, and that it is only in overcoming such initial, and in a sense
'merely apparent*, disunity and irrelevance, that it can be a
unique, unified, all-explanatory Absolute at all. And so much is
this so, that even in the overcoming of such merely apparent
disunity and irrelevance, its appearance, qua appearance, is
preserved: the Absolute must, after a fashion, have an Other, and
an Other incorporating an indefinite amount of lower-level
otherness in itself, in order that it may in detail show, if one may
so abuse language, that its Other is no other than itself, and in
order that it may in truth be itself in that seeming Other. The
preceding sentences have expounded Hegel by adopting his
language: in an absolutism like Hegel’s there is, in the last resort,
nothing else one can do. One must use his language, and the
characteristic logic it embodies, if one is fully to understand or to
communicate what he is maintaining. But, whether one thinks
such an absolutist logic crazy or cogent, it was certainly at all
times the most important and characteristic ‘message* of Hegel.
The Absolute is said, even in the Jena manuscripts, to be 'so like
self in what appears unlike self as to be the absolute ground of
this unlike element’ (Lasson, Jenenser Logikt p. 159), and in the
Encyclopaedia (§ 214) to be ‘the eternal vision of itself in the other*,
while in § 386 Hegel writes characteristically: ‘Mind (Geist) is the
infinite Idea: thus finitude here means the disproportion between
FOREWORD
the concept and the reality—but with the qualification that it is a
shadow cast by the mind’s own light—a show or illusion which the
mind implicitly imposes as a barrier to itself, in order, by its
removal, actually to realize and become conscious of freedom as
its very being, i.e. to be fully manifest’ (Wallace’s translation in
the last two cases). The use of the notion of Geist, Mind or Spirit,
in the last quotation must not mislead us: Hegel believes in a
spiritual, self-thinking Absolute rather than in some other sort
of one, because in conscious life one has a better realization of the
logical properties of an Absolute, of its complete explanatoriness
even of what is most seemingly alien, than one has in any other
sort of Absolute. The place of the definite, limited, not self-
explanatory in Hegel's Absolutism, as the permanent foil and
contrast and raw material, if one may so speak, of the Absolute,
is uniquely characteristic of Hegelianism: one here ha9 Spinozism
with the mutilation and transience of the modes necessarily built
into the unbrokenness and eternity of the One Substance, and in
fact conditioning the latter.
It is the inner tension involved in Hegel’s notion of his Abso­
lute that explains why its unity expresses itself in subjectivity
rather than in substantiality, a unity and an identity which
actively achieves and maintains itself in the face of, and in self-
identification with, the most boundless variety, and which is not
bound down to one inert, fixed character or position, whether
outward or inward, and why, when it is conceived by Hegel in
Platonic terms as an eternal Idea, it is also credited with an in­
herent dynamism or ideal causality, so that it can be said to 'let
itself go’, to give itself specific forms and instances. These last
conceptions may seem to be merely mythic imaginations mas­
querading as logical relations: if Hegel is right, they are, however,
strictly logical relations of which there are many more or less
adequate empirical illustrations. All this may seem very strange
from the point of view of philosophers who are not in quest of the
total explanatoriness which is another name for absolutism, but,
granted this aspiration, the paradoxical character of Hegelian con­
cepts will vanish. They are, arguably, the concepts that one has
to frame if one is to have an absolutism which is contentful and
not empty, and if one’s absolutism is to leave nothing whatever